ART, THE SPECIAL PURPOSE OF DRAPERY, Robert Morris

How often I have been struck by the expressive power of drapery - for grief, how it covers and reveals the defeated, succumbed, accepting body beneath. 

The act of covering the body, its soul passed from our loving circle, so intimate, loving, and final an act.

Consider concentration camp and prison photography, folds falling with strange and ghoulish elegance over emaciated bodies at Auschwitz, stripes ever repellent to me as a shape arrangement after seeing those dreadful images.  

 Mourners from the tomb sculptures of the Court of Burgundy - almost genre, doll-like, plentiful, a riff on draped biblical clothing as imagined in western art.

These resin-coated linen "sculptures" by Robert Morris stunned me.  As a child I was fascinated by the stories and paintings of lepers, supplied courtesy of my Catholic school education.  I saw the film "Ben Hur" as a child, too, those huddling figures   - how they covered their bodies and their pleading eyes. Even then the drapery's folds seemed beautiful to me.  At the time it seemed like the worst fate that could befall a human - that was before I knew about Auschwitz.

In Star Wars, Disney, and medieval tales, characters wrap themselves in cloaks and veils, somehow adding stature and power to their narrative purpose, extending their personal space.  Who would follow closely upon Darth Vader as he sweeps into a room, his black cloak swirling about him?  Or Maleficent, as she appears in the Great Hall to curse the beloved child? 

Then consider Judith Jamison, her dress swirling in "Cry", the impossible clashing dynamics of those ripples and folds, against the hard and frozen valleys and hills of folds against these soulless suffering bodies.    

Christo's draperies for the most part were quite joyous, playful, celebratory:  fabric defying its purpose - a fence of rippling opening cloth instead of cattle restraint, umbrellas for sheltered pleasure, or to gift-wrap an island.  

Of all the works, only "Reichstag" seemed genuinely ambiguous - the sins of Nazism covered, so shameful that they cannot be visual,the proof needing to be always before our eyes.

And the strange white tight pleating, making the fabric-nature look starched, rigid, tight, revealing the classical form and its archetypal message of  glorious humanism.

"Dying Gaul" is certainly present beneath this drapery - questions about covering and uncovering the body, death, privacy, intimacy, the morality of war arise for me.

I think it's incumbent upon serious viewers to undertake to see the artwork from a  aesthetic point of view, developed from theory, history, personal insight, inquiry. 

I wonder if it's moral or even fair to the art to use it for access to places of profound personal grief and shame.  Isn't it truthfully a  narcissistic, subjective. even cathexic (cathexis, Freudian idea) using art for access to stimulus to personal analysis?

Is instrumentalist art even moral?  Or merely manipulative?

Nonetheless, my take-away is the instant access to a vision of compassion springing up from knowing of unspeakable atrocity and needing to go on.  Isn't "Dying Gaul" going to get up and stagger away instead of slipping to the earth's embrace?  Maybe.  I wish it so.